Atalasoft Spins Off Vizit, Offers Social Collaboration for SharePoint

You may recall from last week that Kofax gobbled-up Atalasoft (news, site) with the aim of adding the latter’s SDK to its capture and transformation module. The price was right and so were terms of the deal. But Kofax didn’t get all of Atalasoft, although maybe it should have tried considering Vizit -- one of Atalasoft's products -- has spun off on its own and is targeting the SharePoint market.

Kofax, Atalasoft and Vizit

Without getting bogged-down in the details of the Kofax deal, the financials included an initial cash payment of US$ 4.7 million that could over two years mutate into US$ 10 million. However, they also mentioned that the deal didn’t include Vizit, and we wondered at the time what that might be about.

Well we know now. Vizit has spun-off to take its place with the other celestial bodies that are now serving the SharePoint sun, but with a strong company plan, product portfolio and personnel behind it, it may be that Kofax may regret letting it slip between its fingers.

Vizit’s Future

That said, we don’t know what happened in the negotiations so let’s not speculate. What we do know is that Vizit will continue to develop and extend its content visualization and social collaboration software for SharePoint under the captaincy of Paul Yantus.

And Yantus, at least on paper, has the experience to make this really work. As the newly appointed CEO, in previous lives he was EVP of Captaris, which was sold later to OpenText, and was also involved with Scan-Optics, MSX International and Lason. The CTO will be Rutherford Wilson, who will also oversee product development.

The incubation of Vizit is complete and it is now ready to stand on its own as a strong independent company… The new company is positioned to make its mark in the Microsoft SharePoint market, Bill Bither, Atalasoft CEO said.

Vizit makes SharePoint documents easier to find and manage as well as providing social collaboration that is integrated with SharePoint content, workflow, security and governance.

If a company was ever going to spin-off on its own and purse its own SharePoint path, the timing couldn’t be better given the level of deployment since the release of SharePoint 2010. Watch and see how things go.